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New SNIA Technical Work Group to Focus on Computational Storage

For Release:

2018-11-12

Industry-wide Interest in Solutions and Standards to Move Compute Closer to Data

Colorado Springs, CO., November 12, 2018 - The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) today announced the launch of its Computational Storage Technical Work Group (TWG). SNIA member companies intend to come together to create standards to promote the interoperability of computational storage devices, and to define interface standards for system deployment, provisioning, management, and security. This will enable storage architectures and software to be integrated with computation in its many forms.

The industry is seeing an increase in customer requirements to move compute closer to traditional storage devices and systems. In response, a growing number of data-driven applications have demonstrated that adding computation to the normal storage features of devices and systems can realize a significant performance and infrastructure scaling advantage. Computational Storage solutions typically target applications where the demand to process ever-growing storage workloads is outpacing traditional compute server architectures. These applications include AI, big data, content delivery, database, machine learning and many others that are used industry-wide.

“SNIA has an established infrastructure that supports broad member participation and collaboration, producing successful standards and specifications in response to new technological challenges,” said Mark Carlson, SNIA Technical Council Co-Chair. “SNIA is pleased to establish this new Technical Work Group to facilitate the use of Computational Storage in mainstream application environments.”

Computational Storage represents a paradigm shift to heterogenous compute architectures close to storage data workloads which is enabled by standards such as PCIe and NVM Express®. Future low latency interconnect standards such as GenZ and OpenCAPI are also enabling a peer-to-peer type of architecture or even full OS ecosystems for compute, memory, storage and networking, and will also play a role in the evolution of this technology.

“There are a number of applications that can take advantage of computation being moved closer to data, including disaggregation, encryption/decryption, and operating system-capable computation,” said Scott Shadley, SNIA Computational Storage TWG Co-Chair. “The activities of this new TWG will help the industry and users understand and better use this new paradigm of computer architecture.”

Companies that join SNIA are eligible to participate in this TWG and in 14 other technical work groups. For more information on the Computational Storage Technical Work Group, visit snia.org/computational. For more information on joining SNIA, visit snia.org/become-a-member.

About SNIA

The Storage Networking Industry Association is a not-for-profit global organization, made up of member companies spanning the global storage market. SNIA’s mission is to lead the storage industry worldwide in developing and promoting standards, technologies, and educational services to empower organizations in the management of information. To this end, the SNIA is uniquely committed to delivering standards, education, and services that will propel open storage networking solutions into the broader market. For more information about SNIA, visit https://www.snia.org/.